If you love visual novels with deep lore, go ahead and give this a spin. A "tactical narrative RPG", however, it is not. I want to love this game, but it's missing the core mechanic that any game needs to generate stories: trade-offs that feel meaningful. Thousand Hells feels eerily like a knock-off, as if someone new to game design was trying to make a mobile version of A Sharp's most beloved titles without understanding what made them successful.
A Sharp is somewhat notorious for low-transparency mechanics, which works well in KODP because your community, neighbors, gods, and even the fields and herds you farm will consistently communicate feedback about how your actions have impacted them. As in real life, these ripple effects are ambiguous or suspensefully delayed, which makes the world feel alive. You must constantly make difficult compromises based on limited information, and find creative ways to to navigate conflicting priorities.
In contrast, the decisions available to you in TH are very simplistic, like a children's book. 80% of the choices are 1) go left/right, or 2) attack/negotiate/flee. In general, your randomly generated team members have no strong opinions about what you should do, no particular personalities or goals, and no dedicated storylines. They say nothing and appear to feel nothing about risking their lives repeatedly, remaining mute even if they become heavily injured or demoralized as a result of your choices (except for a possible game over scene that can trigger if the whole team hits rock bottom). Instead of health and morale bars that decrease in proportion to the severity of their injuries, NPCs die instantly after 3 strikes. This leads to unintentionally comical situations where Joe the poet, who almost drowned before getting mauled by a lion, is crossing the treacherous desert just fine while Jane the warrior has abruptly keeled over and died after suffering her third scratch from some brambles.
The rich lore could make up for the hollow NPCs on your team, if only there were any meaningful resource management. Incredibly, many of your supposedly valuable resources are designed to _deprive you_ of playing your adventure, rather than making it more absorbing. You have 4 resource types: special items, personal connections, insight, and supplies. Half of these (items and connections) are functionally the same resource, which I will call "auto-skip". You can spend one of your auto-skips to instantly proceed past any encounter, but this success doesn't feel earned, and actually causes you to miss out on the narrative content entirely. You click the option: "We don't need to navigate alone through this underground city full of spies and intrigue because an old friend who lives there can show us the way," and bam this whole chapter is over, you move on to the next encounter as if nothing happened in between, and you never see or speak of this "old friend" again.
It's revealing that almost any challenge can be avoided if you spend an auto-skip. This betrays some awareness by the devs that the average playthrough will be plagued by a substantial number of situations in which it is impossible for the player to prevail, no matter how skilled they are. Instead of actually addressing this serious design flaw by enriching the narrative (e.g. by introducing a greater variety of ways to approach problems or recover from failure, or roguelike meta-progression to spice up future runs), the devs encourage players to not even bother to attempt to play through large chunks of content in the first place.
Aside from making the plot feel contrived and hand-wavy, auto-skip causes narrative dissonance because you need to use this deus ex machina for the challenges that your team's particular skillset is least likely to survive; meaning that the hardest challenges that you are least prepared for end up being instant successes, while failure follows from less intimidating challenges that you chose not to skip because you had a good chance of succeeding. Similarly, you can only send in 1 team member at a time to solve a problem, and even when their skills are a good fit, failure is common; so that your team members rarely have to risk doing any tasks for which they are poorly suited, but fail frequently at precisely those tasks that are supposed to be their area of expertise.
The other 2 resources are insight and supplies. Having supplies to use for recovering from injuries, bribing people etc. is a great idea, but how many you have left is not shown in the UI at all, a really strange design choice that prevents you from spending or saving them strategically. Insight is a super cool resource, and the only really original mechanic the game contributes to this genre; you can spend it to reveal the success chances of some of your options. In practice, though, it mostly serves to reveal how vague and arbitrary the underlying game rules are. It appears that storylines created by different authors will have very different interpretations of which skills are useful in which context. The lack of a coherent underlying game logic makes it hard to learn from your failures. Much like auto-skip, you can use Insight to meta-game your way out of high-stakes situations, but not to understand deeper patterns.
Above all else, a single set of trade-offs has a massive, almost pre-determining impact on whether you succeed or fail in your quest: the skillset of your team, decided during player character creation and recruitment of 3 RNG companions. Yet you are forced to make these choices before you start your quest, knowing almost nothing about what awaits you, and you can't adapt them later in response to new information. An act of skillful resource management or immersive roleplaying this is not. TH falls into the common RPG trap of including dozens of character traits that are too numerous to balance properly. There are a handful of extremely OP traits crucial for almost any mission (e.g. Perception and Scouting), and then a long list of meh traits that SOUND dope but aren’t relevant 80% of the time (Healer, Royal Blood, Master of Disguise, Lockpicking, etc. etc.). There's a lot of overlap between redundant traits (e.g. Warrior and Combat Training), and super useful traits aren't more costly or rarely occurring than less useful ones, so your teams start to feel super samey across runs.
In addition to skills each team member also has a weakness. In an immersive narrative game, these weaknesses would play a prominent role in the challenges you face as a team, and the failures you suffer. Instead, most scenarios that could trigger weaknesses are telegraphed ahead of time (oh gee, do I, who have a mortal fear of spiders, want to 1) turn left down the tunnel full of SPIDERWEBS or 2) turn right down the tunnel with squeaking noises?) and again, you can just auto-skip the riskiest events. In that sense weaknesses can be easily avoided, and yet in another sense they're also everywhere. Weaknesses won't just create obstacles in challenges that contain relevant narrative content but in literally every challenge, which is just confusing — why is my fear of spiders making it harder for me to sail a boat? After 5 playthroughs I only experienced a single one in which a team member’s weakness wasn't just impractical throughout, like all weaknesses are, but provided a major plot twist in its own right. Honestly aside from the occasional mild annoyance it causes, I would barely have noticed if this mechanic was missing entirely. During playtesting, that should've been a clear sign that its implementation needs to be revisited.
At the end of the day, I'll happily return to the game to explore the rich lore, but I can't really think of another reason to recommend it. I hope the studio continues to experiment with new formats, while staying true to the secret sauce that has made the Glorantha series so special.
